Is it ethical for the president to weigh in on a civil-rights case apparently being examined by his own Justice Department? The president knows that if it is true that African-American males are viewed suspiciously, it is probably because statistically they commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. If that were not true, they might well be given no more attention as supposed suspects than is accorded to white, Asian, or Latino youths. Had George Zimmerman been black, he would have been, statistically at least, more likely to have shot Trayvon Martin -- and statistically likewise less likely to have been tried.
Barack Obama knows that if non-African-Americans were to cease all inordinate scrutiny of young African-American males, the latters' inordinate crime rates would probably not be affected -- given other causation for disproportionate incidences of criminality. Yet should their statistical crime profiles suddenly resemble those of other racial and ethnic groups, the so-called profiling would likely cease.
Just as Eric Holder preferred anecdote to statistics, so too I end with an unscientific vignette of my own. Last week I was driving in northern California with the attorney general's speech playing on the car radio. North of San Francisco I stopped to buy coffee and two local newspapers.
In one, there was a gruesome story of a young African-American male charged with ransacking a San Francisco jewelry store and murdering two employees, Khin Min, 35, of San Francisco, and Lina Lim, 51, of Daly City. The owner of the shop, Vic Hung, fought back and survived, despite receiving gunshot and stab wounds in the attack.
The suspected attacker had a prior record of violent assault. The victims were all of Asian ancestry. I don't think their families would agree with Eric Holder that self-defense laws were the cause of such interracial violence. Nor would the six policemen who were fired upon by the suspect agree that stereotyping prompted this sort of mayhem.
Barack Obama will never suggest that the suspected killer physically resembles himself some three decades ago -- and there would be no point in doing so. Nor will he admit that if Barack Obama owned an urban jewelry store and needed its profits to send his daughters to Sidwell Friends, he too might have become apprehensive when a young black male entered his store.
In the other paper, there was a strangely similar tale. Not far away, in Santa Rosa, at about the same time, two African-American youths in hoodies attacked another jewelry store, also had a shoot-out with the owner, and also failed to evade the police -- though in this case none of the employees or customers was injured.
In such cases, too many Americans find there is a sort of tired sameness. The victims were white or Asian. The murder and robbery suspects were young African-American males. The violence was aimed not at acquiring food or clothing, but at stealing luxury goods. The armed small-business owners tried to defend themselves by firing back at their attackers. Had they been unarmed, both would have probably perished. In one case, the police were fired upon. The suspects had prior arrests.
And on and on and on across America each day, this same tragedy s played out of a small percentage of Americans committing violent crimes at rates far exceeding their proportion of the general population.
The world will long remember Trayvon Martin, but few people -- and certainly not Barack Obama or Eric Holder, who have a bad habit, in an increasingly multiracial country, of claiming solidarity on the basis of race -- will care that Khin Min and Lina Lim were torn to pieces by bullets and a knife. Few will care that they died in a vicious assault that had nothing to do with stereotyping, Stand Your Ground self-defense, weak gun laws, insufficient federal civil-rights legislation, or any of the other causes of interracial violence falsely advanced by the attorney general -- but quite a lot to do with an urban culture that for unspoken reasons has spawned an epidemic of disproportionate violent crime on the part of young African-American males.
I offer one final surreal footnote to this strange juxtaposition of reading the real news while listening to the mytho-history that a Eric Holder constructed from the death of Trayvon Martin to indict both the police and the public.
What were the names of two of the men suspected of being the ones who last week shot it out with the Santa Rosa jeweler as Eric Holder demagogued the Trayvon Martin shooting?
#1
it is my opinion that the behavior of the administration and the media, in plain disregard of the fact, means that the goal is not combating actual racism (per the old definition, not the new, tailored one), but continuing a program of dhimmification. Compare the verbal behavior of an abuser attempting to maintain control over a victim showing signs of "having had enough" with the verbal behavior we are hearing from the White House and the media. I think there is fear that, having failed so far in their attempts to judicially lynch Zimmerman, "people will get uppity", increasing the difficulty of maintaining and extending an attitude of "I can't win against these people." The NSA monitoring program CANNOT possibly monitor everyone because it is designed to search for linkages (connections) between people (nodes). The possible number of connections between nodes grows to the factorial of the number of nodes, which makes the problem of universal scanning computationally unfeasable. They best they can hope is get clues as to who to monitor and monitor a subset of suspicious nodes. The power the NSA program holds over ALL the people is actually miniscule, though it is immense over a few. The intimidation factor is that EVERYONE believes that THEY are the FEW the NSA is monitoring. It is THAT intimidation factor that is the major portion of the value that the NSA monitoring program gives to "The Man", since most people will keep their heads down and not show up as false positives in the system, requiring the expenditure of resources to positively eliminate. "Keeping your head down" ==> Not "getting uppity".
(An aside: Given this, the best way to gut the value of the monitoring program is for more people to "get uppity". We already know the IRS targets the tea party, and there is no indication to believe that the NSA is not doing so as well. "Getting Uppity" means more potential threats that the NSA has to monitor. Toss in a few weakly encrypted passages from the declaration of independence or the Bill of Rights, and there will be so many distractors that the combinatorial explosion would bring the system to its knees. The only alternative is trimming the search space, which means leaving out suspects, which should give the professional paranoids in charge of the program stomach ulcers.)
#2
Toss in a few weakly encrypted passages from the declaration of independence or the Bill of Rights, and there will be so many distractors that the combinatorial explosion would bring the system to its knees.
I'm awfully glad you are on our side, Ptah. Isn't "overwhelm 'em by their rules" one of the Alinsky tactics?
#2
I watched w/the wife last night. One of Bill's best segments in a really long time. (Too bad he's white and therefore his opinion on this subject is racist /sarc/)
#3
Whoa, steaming! Give a listen. A white Bill Cosby.
And he's right.
What's needed here isn't more planning or more government. What's needed are leaders at all levels to put this country back on path by talking around the priceless politicians.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
In one, there was a gruesome story of a young African-American male charged with ransacking a San Francisco jewelry store and murdering two employees, Khin Min, 35, of San Francisco, and Lina Lim, 51, of Daly City. The owner of the shop, Vic Hung, fought back and survived, despite receiving gunshot and stab wounds in the attack.
